


The Lodger

by WinterSwallow



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Mother Panic, Young Animal - Fandom
Genre: And some sexual imagery, And swearing because Violet has a potty mouth., Canon Typical Violence, Epilogue, F/M, Future Gotham, Gotham AD, Some PG rated sexy times, ooh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 20:19:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15915534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WinterSwallow/pseuds/WinterSwallow
Summary: In a Gotham without the bat, Violet has specific needs and Jason has no casual mode.





	The Lodger

**Author's Note:**

> So, remember at the end of Mother Panic Mama Paige just straight up adopted Jason, even though he was like 35 at the time and also totally crazy and hallucinating dead Robins?
> 
> Some canon typical violence here. And a lot of F bombs.
> 
> One scene that evokes some unpleasant tactile and sexual imagery. It that's not your bag it's well marked by double ** and a lot of italics.

Both of them cry until there are no more tears left, and when, at last, neither of them have anymore grief left to spill, Mother sniffs and smiles a glass-brittle smile and says “I have put the poor, dear boy to sleep in the blue room.”

It takes half a dozen seconds for Violet to realise that by _poor, dear boy_ she means the murderous ideologue who styles himself Lord Robin.

Violet rubs sore eyes with the heel of her hand, thinks of Rosie and Otis asleep downstairs, thinks of Dr Varma, whom she promised would have refuge here.

“Is that safe?” she asks.

“Oh, yes. He was like the nightingale, instead of the robin, determined to prick his heart on the thorns to turn the rose red, but that’s all over now. He won’t hurt himself.”

“You know very well that’s not what I mean.”

“He needs time to fledge again,” says Mother, settling her shawl, “And untangle himself from the thorns. Like us all.” She strokes Violet’s hair.

Violet sighs. “How long will he be staying?”

Mother kisses her forehead. “I imagine that depends, my dear, on you.”

*

She finds his ugly ass armour where he shed it, in pieces all along the hall.

She gathers it up, packs it in a black plastic sack and goes out and drops it off the deepest part of the pier she can find.

It makes her feel no safer.

*

“Do you think he’s dead?” Rosie asks when he doesn’t come out of his room for three days. She has taken to sitting outside his bedroom, with her nose pressed to the floor as if she might be able to peek through the crack. “All dead and melty and disgusting?”

God, Violet hopes so.

“All wormy and oozing and putridy, with... with maggots coming out his eye and worms burrowing through his brain.” Rosie gives a wet sniff. “It doesn’t smell maggoty,” she says. “Fennec foxes have an excellent sense of smell.” She pauses and seems uncertain. “Don’t they?”

Violet shrugs.

“You’ll have to bury him if he’s dead,” says Rosie, with relish. “Ooh, could we dissolve him in acid?”

“Come on,” Violet grabs her by the ponytail and drags her in the direction of the kitchen. “Otis made pancakes.”

*

After another two days she decides it is past time to figure out if he has gone maggoty. She doesn’t knock. After all, it is her house.

She finds him sitting on the floor of the blue room, in some sort of, she supposes, meditation position. The curtains are drawn.

“I brought you clothes,” she says. It seems only fair, since she threw away his suit.

She gets no response, so she crosses the room and places the pile of clothes atop the armoire. There are shirts and socks and a pair of tired old jeans. Mother dug them out of the attic. Violet supposes they must have belonged to her father, once. Looking at them now she is not sure they will fit him. She had thought it was all the suit, but he has the same build as Father Bruce, broad across the shoulders and tall.

At last, he cracks an eye open.

“Oh. It’s you,” he says. “The white witch.”

“It’s Mother Panic,” she snaps, turning to glare at him.

“Oh,” he says, closing his eyes again. “Stupid name.”

_You’re one to talk, Lord Robin._ It takes all of her self control not to say it, to dig her fingernails into her palms and keep quiet, and perhaps he senses that in the air because he opens his eyes again. He looks her up and down in a measured way.

“I’m sorry,” he says at last, “About before. It wasn’t very...”

He doesn’t seem to know what it was or wasn’t, just trails off, looking at her. “Your mother’s very kind.”

“She is.  And I’m not.” She steps across the room and crouches down so she is at eye level with him. He rears back, as if the proximity makes him uncomfortable.  “What I want to know is, are you dangerous?”

He shuts his eyes again, as if looking at her hurts him. Finally, he says, “I don’t know.”

Her disbelief comes out in a contemptuous ‘hnh!' When he opens his eyes again and finds that she hasn’t gone anywhere, that she’s prepared to wait until she gets an answer, he says, “I know I’m dangerous when I want to be. I don’t know yet if I’m dangerous when I don’t want to be.”

Strangely, of all the things he could have said, she can relate to this. “The people in this house are under my protection,” she says, “And I will do whatever it takes to ensure their safety.”

“That is... appreciated,” he says, as if tasting the words on his tongue.

They gaze at each other for a while and then he says. “Is that all?”

She leaves him to it.

*

After that, she doesn’t see him for a while.

He must be sneaking out at night to raid the kitchen, but if he is, she doesn’t catch him.

One morning, she notices a plate and tumbler stacked neatly in the draining board and wonders if it belongs to him.

*

She realises he must be visiting her mother in the garden, because someone has rooted out the big tree stump to make room for new bedding.

At first she thinks it is Otis who is responsible, but when she asks him if he’s behind it, Ratcatcher laughs until she thinks he might puke. 

She still doesn’t see him.

*

“He is a good boy, and a bad man and a broken bird,” says her mother when she asks. “And none of those things are contradictory. You must wait, Violet, until I see better what he is to become. You must give us time.”

Violet grumbles and goes back to potting pansies.

*

Then one night he joins them for dinner.

He wears a plaid shirt and a pair of worn jeans that hang too low on his hips. Violet looks away quickly before he might catch her gaze lingering on the jut of his hipbones.

He sits at the dinner table and eats in silence and when he is done he says ‘thank you’ like a little boy and takes his plate to the kitchen.

The rest of them sit around watching him like this is not the weirdest fucking thing they have ever seen.

Her mother beams like she has something to be proud of.

*

He is not quiet when he moves, he is silent. She never hears him, not unless he wants her to. Sometimes, she will turn and he will just be standing there, watching her. Sometimes she will be in the middle of a conversation with him and he will seem to get bored and just vanish.

He moves as if his feet don’t quite touch the ground.   

*

And then there is Selina.

“I hear you have a house guest,” she says the next time Violet visits the forest.

The girl, the one with blue eyes and the crossbow, is sitting on the bed, painting her toenails, humming to herself, but she stops when Selina says this.

Violet lets out an irritated click of the tongue. “Yes.”

“Tell him his children are doing fine, and that when he’s good and ready I’m going to come and collect for all the trouble he’s caused me.”

*

She suspects her mother is kindly, genteelly bullying him. How else can she explain the course of home improvements he seems to have undertaken? The fourth stair no longer creaks.  The doors are properly hung and well oiled.  The kitchen slowly populates with repaired home appliances.

It infuriates her how she can never catch him in the act.

*

Since he eats more than the rest of them put together and is otherwise mostly useless, somebody – not her – gets the idea to put him in charge of the cooking.

It turns out he knows how to make boiled chicken, steamed vegetables and nothing else.

After a week of this, Violet, who would drink champagne for breakfast if she could, is having dreams where she murders him gruesomely with a carrot stick.  Otis takes over in the kitchen.

*

He starts going out, in nothing more sophisticated then combat pants and a dark anorak.

It sets her anxiety jangling, makes her nervous down to the marrow of her bones.

But she doesn’t follow him. Even he deserves his privacy.

*

Otis lets him back in to the kitchen only when he realises how good he is at chopping vegetables.

Even for her, it’s fascinating to watch.

He dices a carrot in a blur, flips the knife over in his hand and dices the parsnips.

Rosie watches with something bordering on ecclesiastical awe.

“Can you teach me that?” she asks as he slides the cubed veggies into a casserole dish.

He gives her a thoughtful look. The knife pivots in the air like an Olympic diver.  “You stabbed me in the back,” he says, at last.

Rosie beams. “That’s true. But you threw me into a wall.”

With a flick of his wrist the knife lodges in a rutabaga. “How about I teach you how not to get thrown into walls first before we move on to disembowelling people?”

“Yeah!” Rosie almost skips out of the kitchen.

At the kitchen table, Violet puts her head in her hands.

*

The walls of his bedroom are littered with bits of paper. There are maps and photographs and coffee ring stained bills of sale, all tied together with pieces of honest to god, red string. He’s stolen an ancient laptop from somewhere and the thing is churning out rows of impenetrable numbers.

“What the hell is this?” she wants to know.

“Oh,” he looks up, as if he had barely realised that the disordered mess was there. “Racketeering case.”

“Ohhh, racketeering case,” she mimics him, as she picks up a phonebook-sized wedge of paper, on which appear to be printed a log of the mayor’s phone records.

“I used to do this some times. When I... when I was in Arkham. It keeps me... calm, sane, whatever. Saner.” His anger sparks like a match striking against flint, sudden and bright. “I don’t have to justify myself to you.”

Her anger is like dry paper. It catches immediately. _Yes you do,_ she thinks, _you do because you are living under my roof. You do because I don’t know if part of you wants to rule the city or burn it or save it. I don’t think **you** even know, you stupid bat-fuck. I should have taken you out and executed you the night you got here and dropped you off the pier with your stupid fucking suit. _

She leaves the room.

*

Rosie likes him.

They spend hours together in the mansion’s old theatre and Rosie fair burbles about the things he teaches, which as far as Violet can discern,  are mostly interesting ways to break someone’s nose and also how to count to 10 in Japanese.

When Violet points out that _he had tried very hard to actually and legitimately kill her,_ Rosie had rolled her eyes and said, “That was like, _weeks_ ago.”

*

 

And then there is the night he starts shrieking. Not like a person, like an animal being butchered.

Rosie is shaking in the doorway. Violet calls for Dr Varma to draw up a sedative. She yells in his face, “Stop! What the hell is the matter with you?” She’s not sure he can hear her

He keeps saying names, calling out, cursing, crying at people she doesn’t know. And now he’s thrashing about and is quick as a viper, but stupid, thank fuck, because he is still half-asleep, so the thin blades of the knives he keeps on him in bed end up vibrating in the dry wall instead of her eye socket.

They get the sedative into him and he sleeps.

*

He asks her and only her to come with him the next morning. He says she will understand when they get there.

The warehouse had apparently been his base of operations. His hand shakes as he turns the key in the padlock, as he disarms the security.

Inside, dust motes swirl in the slanting sunshine. On the back wall, half a dozen worn out costumes hang, pinned haphazardly by nails.

She hears him let out the breath he has been holding as he snags the lowest and easiest to reach.

Then he sits on the steps and buries his head in the tatters of the black and yellow cloak. She pretends not to hear him crying.

*

“It’s not your fault, child.”

“It is. I should have been there. I could’ve – I should’ve died with them.”

Carefully, she eases the gate to the garden closed.

*

She finds him alone in the kitchen early one morning with a cup of coffee at his elbow and the crossword puzzle in front of him. He taps his pen against his teeth. 

She busies herself making toast and does her best to ignore him.

“You're stronger than me,” he says quietly, “But I’m pretty sure now I could get a knife between your ribs on your left side.”

She freezes, her hand on the refrigerator door. That his other, more violent persona, might re-emerge as he is tackling 16-down at the breakfast table is no stranger than anything else in this peculiar domestic arrangement.

“But it would be easy to fix that hole in your guard,” he continues, “With a little work.”

There is a long pause before he says, “I could show you.”

*

Her pride makes her wait another two weeks before she allows him to – to give her some pointers.

*

There is _so much stretching_ involved.

It bores her. If he does this much stretching with Rosie she’s surprised the little girl hasn’t tried to assassinate him.

*

This particular sadist is an epicurean.

He hosts dinners for his fellow Collective members. Atlantean braised on the bone, Virgin boys poached in milk, little girls consumed still alive, drugged with molly to make the meat taste sweeter.

She cooks him on his own roasting spit.

“Do you like that, you fuck?” she asks as she pours garlic infused oil onto the fire to make the flames jump. “Doesn’t your fat carcass smell delicious? Doesn’t it make you hungry?”

She realises too late that she is not alone.

And before she can do anything, Jason steps out of the shadows and slits the epicurean’s throat. Blood sizzles into the fire.

“What are you – What are you doing?” she shrieks. “ _How dare you.”_

He says nothing, but takes the time to wipe his knife.

“He – he deserved it,” she hisses.

“But you don’t.”

**

Death’s head moth. Wedding cake. Girl with diamonds for eyes. Clock rolling backwards. Cat with a squirming mouse. Old men sucking cock. Mouldy bread. Beating heart. Squashed flies.

_“Mother panic? Mother  Panic? Violet!?”_

Ballerina with hooves for feet. The smell of roasting peanuts. Dear in rifle scope. Blood between her legs.

_Jason. Please help. There’s something wrong with her. She won’t wake up! Jason, please do something._

Woman with goat head. Biting into tinfoil. Falling. Swinging pocket watch. New shoots. Dead horse. Tusks clad in gold. A thousand bloody teeth. Bats.

_Suditi! What the hell’s happening to her?_

_It’s -- Terminal phase. It happened to almost all of the Gather House girls, when their programming became too much._

Mosquito in a net. Prisms tinkling in porch light. A rough tongue scraping her tit.

_How do we help her?_

_We can’t. There’s no way to stop it. They suffer a sudden catastrophic depletion of glutamate, then they die. Oh, Violet, I’m sorry._

Tourniquet tight around the arm. The feeling of coming. An egg with a dead chick inside. Earth after rain.

_Stop that! Think! If we maximise her glutamate release, flood her brain with it, would that work? Might it be enough to ride out the status?_

_Maybe --but._

 Ice cream splat on the floor. Red Rose blooming from the body of a dead bird. Orchestra out of tune. Tulips. Sunshine. A razor blade scraping across bare bone.

_LSD. We could give her LSD. That might work, right?_

Red lips dripping honey. White balloon floating downward. Rosie’s head on a platter. Guttering candle. Dripping fat. Madonna and child.

_Don’t lie to me, Doctor. I know you keep that shit in the house. I know she makes you keep it for her._

Tarantula. Gag reflex. Hemsley fucking Mama.  Hemsley fucking her.

_Violet, I’m really sorry, but this is going to hurt like hell._

Blood on snow. Wasp’s nest.  Papa fucking her.

_Breathe. Come on, breathe. Breathe._

Spilt milk. Purple flowers.

_Breathe._

**

Rosie climbs under the covers with, nuzzling her. She holds her close.

*

He makes her tea.

*

He doesn’t notice her scars.

She finds that strange, because everyone she has ever been with notices them, even the ones that don’t mention it.  People find them sad or scary or erotic. Shejust hates it when her lovers touch them. Like they want to feel the edges of the broken pieces of her.

 But when she works out with him, stripped down to shorts and a sports bra, she never catches him noticing them. They are to him just a part of her body, like her nose or her ears.

*

Lois finds the brown envelope sitting on her desk in the morning. It was not there the night before. Inside is a three hundred page document, carefully referenced and impeccably sourced, detailing the Mayor of Gotham’s involvement in a scheme to defraud pensioners, and his ties to the Bludhaven mob.

Lois takes off her reading glasses.

“Hey, Smallville...” she calls over her shoulder.

*

Violet Paige is a sensational hit in Club Avante. The champagne is chilled, the music is slow jazz and the polo player with his tongue in her mouth is just _delicious_.

Someone clears their throat.

“Honest to God, Rosie – ” 

Jason stands at the other side of the table, arms folded. “We need to go.” he says.

*

“Aren’t you going to apologise?” she asks as they run towards whatever chaos is exploding across the horizon.

“It didn’t look like I was interrupting anything important.” It’s the first time she has heard him make anything like a joke, and she hates him for it.

*

Sometimes, when he enters a room, she hears his footfalls and this annoys her all the more. He is letting her hear him, she knows, being deliberately loud. As if she is a child in need of placating.

One evening when he tries this, she throws a book at his head.

*

“Violet, you’re being a baby.”

“I’m not being a – _owww_! Would you stop?” She tries to bat him away but he simply ducks under her fist.

“That knife was rusty and it was covered with dirt. The wound needs to be stitched and cleaned and _you_ need a tetanus shot.”

“I don’t like needles.”

“You’ll like tetanus even less. Lockjaw will ruin your good looks.”

“Dr Varma – ”

“Is not here and I am and I have sewn up a thousand knife wounds just like this and _if you do not stop trying to hit me –_ you won’t get a lollipop when we’re done.”

She pouts as he sews her up . “You think you’re so funny... ”

He’s too pre-occupied with his job to smile, but his eyes soften in amusement.

“I’m a Robin. We quip when we need to get heroes to do what we want. It’s in the job description.”

*

 “Are you ever going to put him out of his misery?” asks Otis one day.

 “Who?” she says, digging through the soil with her trowel. She’s helping her mother with the weeding. Otis is supposed to be helping too. Instead he is sitting on a mushroom, sucking noisily on a chicken bone.

“You _know_ who. Handy with a throwing star. Ass you can bounce a quarter off. Follows you around like a kicked puppy. Mr Tall, Dark and Batty. Who else?”

“I’m not putting him out of his misery. I’m not putting any part of him anywhere. We have nothing in common.”

“So, just your type then, eh?” Otis cackles.

“We barely talk.”

“Never stopped you before.”

“It’s not going to happen, Otis.”

Otis licks sauce off his fingers. “Well, would you at least consider a mercy kill then? All those hours in the gym.   _Sparring._ The kid’s balls must be blue as a pair of tuppeny marbles by now.”

She throws down her trowel and rises. Mother’s eyes are twinkling.

“Don’t. Say. A. Word.” Violet hisses.

*

“You’re not concentrating.” He’s got her in a pin hold, her arm twisted behind her and sandwiched between her back and his chest. She can feel his breath against her neck. “What’s the matter?”

“N-nothing.” She tries to struggle out of his grasp.

“No, not like that.” He sounds disappointed. “We’ve been over this. If you try to brute force your way out you could tear your rotator – ”

She flips him. If he wasn’t quicker she might have pinned him under her. The thought makes heat rise in her neck.

She glares at him.

Her shoulder twinges.

“-Cuff.” He finishes, a gentle admonishment.

Businesslike, he goes to stand behind her, and begins to probe her shoulder with his fingers. She is aware of the heat of him, of the strength in the hands that are touching her so gently.  Sometimes when he touches her she thinks he treats her body like a musical instrument. He is careful with her, but dissatisfied, as if she is out of tune, as if he can hear the bum notes and wants to fix them.

She should hate that, because it’s not so different from what they did to her in Gather House, but she doesn’t.

She wonders about kissing him and why something that has always come so naturally to her is suddenly so hard.

*

He’s onto another case now, plotting to take down a ponzi scheme, like it’s a hobby;  like he’s finished the jigsaw of the fruit basket and is now on to the one with three kittens.

She finds it absurd.

*

And now he is leaving mob accountants tied to poles outside the Gotham PD.

*

And sometimes he does handstands on the edge of the roof.

*

And he still eats just a ridiculous amount of boiled chicken.

*

At this point she just wants sex.

Needs it, like an itch that has to be scratched.

And that’s why she’s in the back room of _The Rotten Cotton_ with a debutante who is just dying to make Daddy unhappy.

Sasha is doing all the right things too. She coos and writhes in her lap and positively purrs when Violet whispers all the _dirtiest things_ in her ear.

Jason will be across town by now, on a gargoyle with a good view of the Aparo Suite of the Grand Hotel.

Loser.

“Violet,” whines the girl whose collarbone Violet has been sucking on for maybe more time than is strictly sexy, “Is something the matter?”

“Nothing,” says Violet and moves on to an earlobe. “Tell me again about all the nasty things you imagined me doing to you when you were at boarding school, Sara.”

“It’s Savannah.”

He’ll probably stagger in at all hours of the morning too, soaking wet. And not even in like a sexy, wet t-shirt kind of way, because that hideous anorak covers the goods _she knows_ he has.  He generally smells like sewer water, and he’s usually bleeding because it’s Gotham and he stopped a carjacking on his way home and he...

Oh, God.

She can’t be that basic, can she?

She’s Violet Paige, Gotham City siren, the baddest girl in the baddest city in the world. She laps up decadence. She spreads sin over her breakfast toast like marmalade. She cannot possibly be mooning over a tall, dark straight boy with nice arms with whom she shares a domestic arrangement and whose idea of a good time is spending Saturday night sitting on a wet gargoyle while he surveils a mob poker game.

Can she?

Oh, God.

“Samira, get off.”

“It’s Savannah.”

“Yeah, fine, fine. Stay in school.”

*

She joins him atop the gargoyle. He has got binoculars and a thermos full of tea. Across the street at the poker game Penguin is just being dealt in.

“What are you doing here?” he sounds surprised.

“Have you cracked this one, yet?” she asks as she sits down beside him and winces. She forgot to take her G-string off before switching into her suit.  “Because I’m really in the mood to kill something.”

*

“You may need to give him a little push from the nest, dearheart,” Mother says. “He is a bird and birds are not used to not being good at something.”

And then, apparently because oracular metaphor is not getting the job done when it comes to humiliating her daughter she says, “You intimidate him, being as you are, so much more experienced.”

“In the bedroom,” she adds.

“Sexually,” she says.

Violet throws her hands up. “Yes mother. Message received. Thank you.”

*

They have the house to themselves. Rosie has taken Mother to the garden centre to buy begonias. Dr Varma and Dominic are at a conference. Otis has a date of all things.

If Violet suspects her mother has orchestrated all this, well, what is the point in arguing? Mama can wield elliptical mutterings like a goddamn conversational scalpel and if she had argued Violet would have only ended up blushing.

She has a drink to steel herself and then she goes to find him. He is sitting in the study reading “A Brief History of Nearly Everything.”

“Okay,” she says, “We’re doing this.”

“Doing what?” he asks mildly, looking up from his book.

It’s awkward to lean down and kiss him when he’s sitting in the deep armchair. She does so anyway.

“Oh,” he says and then, “Thank you.”

He does not put his book down.

“Are you planning to re-start a Bat-cult and name yourself its saviour again?” she asks him.

An eyebrow goes up. “Um, it hadn’t factored into my plans for this evening.”

 “Are you planning on murdering us all in our beds?”

“No?”

“Good enough.” She kisses him again. It’s messy. Their teeth clack against each other hard enough for it to hurt.

He kisses her back though. Then his arm goes around her waist and he pulls her into the chair with him. It’s warm and squashed and _good._ Her hands are in his hair.

“I don’t do this much,” he breaks off their kissing and looks, honestly, a little afraid. His eyes have a little green in them, she had never noticed. “I might not be very good. When puberty hit I was clinically dead.”

She decides that sometimes it’s better not to ask.

“That’s alright.” She scoots up in his lap, putting his hands precisely where she wants them. “You have a very good teacher.”

*

“Fuck the Bat,” she had said, lifetimes ago and worlds away. So she does.

Just as everyone predicted, he is hopelessly unskilled, but like all of his kind, he is a fast learner.

_*_

The ribbing Otis gives them, separately and together, is something they both have to endure.

*

Selina raises an eyebrow, but says nothing.

Her girl, in her little cat cowl and mitts stares up at Jason, her blue eyes wide as pennies.

For his part, he seems just as astonished to meet her. He glances up at Selina but the Cat gives nothing away.

He shakes her hand solemnly when she offers it. “Pleased to meet you.” She hears the crack in his voice.

Later he makes the girl a paper crane.

“Bird of Prey?” he says.

She giggles.

*

“You have more than me,” She says, later and realises she is doing the exact thing she despised most in her earlier lovers.

They lie over the covers of his bed, noses almost touching. “It’s not a competition,” he says and, “I’ve been doing this longer than you.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t a competition,” she says.

“Only if you don’t want it to be.”

She traces the ridge of tissue that traverses his collarbone. “Deathstroke,” he says, his hand going over hers as her fingers meander along it, “When I was 19. Got sloppy.”

She turns over onto her belly and guides his finger so he traces the long train of scar that runs from the nape of her neck to the curve of her tailbone. “My first enhancement surgery,” she says, “To reinforce my spine.”

Her hand spiders over the shiny white marks that pepper his eight pack. “Firebomb, he says. Those are the spots where the Kevlar melted onto my skin.”

He touches the spot beneath her throat with his thumb. “Tracheostomy scar,” she says, “They kept me in an induced coma for three months.”

She takes his hand in both of hers and kisses the knot of misshapen bone at the base of his thumb, then puts her lips around his whole thumb, sliding down to the first knuckle and then the second.

“My – ah ha – my Dad, when I was seven. Bent the thumb back to put manners on me.”

This somehow kills the mood.

Funny thing is, he doesn’t seem to mind. He rolls onto his back and puts his hands behind his head, stretching out.

“Oh,” he says, after they’ve been lying there for a minute. “This is a good one.” He bends up his leg to show her the neat surgical scar that swirls over his knee. “Compound tib-fib fracture when I was 13, courtesy of the god of hysterical media.”

“You fought the god of hysterical media?”

“I fought his angry mob.”

Her disbelief must show on her face because he laughs and says, “I swear to Grodd, that’s a thing that happened to me. I also went to Superman’s birthday party.”

She elbows him in the side. “Asshole, what’s a Grodd?”

“You’ve never heard of Grodd? Evil psychic Gorilla? Prince of Gorilla city?”

She makes a face at him. “That’s not a thing.”

“It’s a thing.”

“Maybe on your earth. It’s definitely not a thing on my Earth.”

He leans in and kisses her shoulder and maybe the mood’s not totally dead.  “It’s a thing.”

  _*_

_“You are a nothing but a spoiled, self-obsessed brat, you know that?”_

_“And you are a phenomenal hypocrite. Are **you** really going to lecture **me** on doing the right thing?  You are a **lapsed sociopath** and a mass murderer and the only reason you’re not still sending children out to die for your insane cause is because my mama took pity on you! Or is that something else you learned from Daddy-Bat? **”**_

His body language goes very still at that and the anger doesn’t precisely go away, but it changes from something like a raging fire to a dynamo, spinning at the centre of his core.

“To hell with you, Violet,” he says, “And your pathetic, selfish quest and your pathetic little enclave. If you can’t understand why the right thing is to go out there, the right thing is _not to let the city burn,_ then I can’t explain it for you _.”_ He grabs his jacket from off the chair.

Violet steps in front of him again pulls her cardigan around her more closely. “This city never did anything to you or to me or anyone except take and take and take. I say let it burn.”

_“No.”_

She slaps him. “Then if you love your precious Gotham so much you can go and fuck it instead.”

“Goodbye, Violet.”

“I hope you die out there,” she screams after him.

*

Of course, she regrets it immediately and even more so later when she’s sitting by his sickbed and Dr Varma is telling her that he will live but not for want of trying.

She knows that he does these things just to spite her.

When he wakes she is holding his hand, and she swears if he laughs at her now she will pull every tube out of him and leave him to bleed out in his hospital bed.

Instead, he says, “The city?”

“Unburnt,” she sighs.

“Okay.” He falls back to sleep.

*

There is a stranger sitting at the kitchen table. He is wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and he and Jason appear to be sharing a store-bought rhubarb pie. They are deep in some private conversation and she can see from the set of his shoulders, from the way his foot is poised under the table, that Jason is listening very carefully. 

There is a thick manila envelope under the man’s thumb and he taps it for emphasis. “This is honest, detailed work. Airtight. I hope you know how proud he’d be of this.”

Jason grunts.

“And what you did last week, that didn’t go unnoticed either.”

Jason grunts again.

The man looks up at her and Mama standing in the door and smiles. “Well, I’ll take my leave.”

He takes a pencil from behind his ear and jots something down on a scrap of paper, a phone number. “Call him. Don’t wait too long. He wants to talk to you.” When Jason doesn’t reach to take the note he puts it down by his hand.  “ _And come to dinner!”_

“I’ll think about it.” The man is already rising, and Jason, for once, is a beat behind.

“Mrs Paige, Ms Paige.” The man stops and makes an old fashioned tip of the head to them both. He has kind eyes. They seem old, but there isn’t a fleck of silver in his hair or a single wrinkle on his face.

Violet cannot help feel a sense of foreboding.

Her mother twitters and blushes like a school girl.

*

“So, how did it go?” Lois leans back in her chair as he comes through the door.

“Good, I think. I hope. It’s been a long time coming, but he seems better. He surprised me.”

“Mmm,” she says. “And those _eight hundred billion dollars_ nestled up against each other in Gotham National Bank, are they about to get a surprise?”

“It didn’t come up.”

She rolls her head back and gives him the evil eye. “You know I want that exclusive, Smallville. Long lost Wayne heir returns from the dead to inherit his adopted father’s fortune. It’s the story that’s got everything. Money. Power. Intrigue. Murder. Pathos. Parallels. As fond as I am of you, you, beefy hunk of Krypton, a scoop like that would really keep a girl warm all night.”

“I’m not going to pressure him into that or anything else. I just want him to be happy. That’s what Bruce wanted for all of them.”

She snorts so hard that coffee shoots back down her nose. “Hah! I bet you twenty bucks you’ll have filled that empty seat at the table inside of 18 months. 12 if there’s a Crisis.”

He kisses the top of her head. “You know I’d never bet against you, dear.”

*

They say you can’t go home again.

She finds out that’s not actually true.

The city smells of diesel and sea-salt and night. In the distance, Wayne Tower still stands, the red guide light blinking on its spire.

Gotham.

Her Gotham.

And a callow young man – a boy really – sitting on the edge of the rooftop. A pair of guns rest upon his knees.  The casual slouch of his bones belies how fast he can move if he needs to. His smiles at her, and his smile is cracked down the middle.

“Hey, lady, nice outfit.”

*

Before she goes, she kisses his cheek. He turns the same colour as his helmet. His brothers fall about the place laughing. He swipes at the kiss as if he is nine and not 19. “Uh, thanks?”

“Be brave, Jason Todd,” she whispers in his ear and before he can question it, before his eyebrows have even shot all the way up, she is gone.

She goes home.

Only later does she realise she forgot to ask about the gorilla.

*

“You are, if it’s possible, in an even worse mood than usual.” His arm snakes around her shoulders. “What did you see when you were -- over there?”

She rests her head against his chest and absently he strokes a strand of hair back off her face. “Nothing,” she says, “Go to sleep.”

*

She leaves the letter Bruce wrote him by his bedside, kisses his temple and goes down to the deli to buy OJ. He’s not the sort of person who likes to leave his weaknesses where other people can see them. They have that in common.

It was in that other, once familiar world where he did not know her that she realised she was in love with him.

But it is as she is putting grapefruit in her carrier basket that she realises that this might be okay.

*

She braces herself for the horrors she is going to find floating in the tank, but when she looks she finds it has nothing to do with her at all.

It is a little boy, with dark hair and fine cheekbones, tethered to the tank by an artificial umbilical cord, a cage of wires around his skull.

Beside her, Jason has gone very still. He braces his hands against the glass of the tank.

“Damian.”

*

At Jason’s insistence, they name the little boy Tom.

“What sort of peasant’s name is that?”asks the kid, imperious.

“It’s a good name,” says Jason, handing him his bowl of stew. “It’s your grandfather’s name.” And then, “Your own name isn’t safe right now.”

“Tt,” says the boy, “Alexander would be the superior choice.”

A little while later he throws his stew against the wall, and no one can eat until he has been made to pick it up.

*

Rosie loathes him and he loathes her, with an intensity that would be frightening if it weren’t so hilarious.

_“Todd, I see you still haven’t taken the garbage out.”_

_“Foxes eat birds, you rabid little shit. And you wouldn’t even be one gulp.”_

*

“You’re not my father.” The boy keeps his knees tucked to his chest, as he feeds some of Otis’s friends cookie crumbs. “Or my brother. You are just a stray.” The rats crawl across his lap. “And I am just a clone.”

“That’s true,” Jason sits beside him.  He puts his hand out and one of the rats runs up the inside of his arm. “You’ll always be number two. And if, a thousand years from now, any bit of this is remembered at all, he’s the one whose name they will know. But you are the reason his name will be remembered. If you’re strong enough to bear that burden.”

“Maybe,” says the boy, chewing on the words slowly. “It doesn’t matter who they remember, so long as there is someone there to remember?”

*

“Alfred,” he stands with one foot on the bottom step of the stairs, cradling the phone as carefully as if it is a child, “Alfred, I know I have no right to call you...”

*

The woman is a beauty for the ages, dark skinned and doe eyed. Her mouth is a round O of surprise. “Damian,” she says, “You will not disobey me.”

“It’s Tom, Mother, and I would ask you not to forget it,” says the boy, high-handed as ever.”Damian was my elder brother. Todd has been teaching me about him. He was brave and clever and good, and I hope to one day be half the man he was.”

*

The day comes when Tom and Rosie do almost kill each other and if not for Otis’s intervention they really might have. Violet sees the blood on the floor, the bruises blooming around Rosie’s throat and feels sick.

When she goes to look for Jason, she finds him already filling a duffel bag. He tosses clothes into the bag, and knives, a pair of cloth wrapped kukri. Not the guns though, those he leaves on the shelf.

“You don’t have to go,” she says and wishes that she meant it.

“I do,” he says, “It’s time. This place has been my refuge, but if I don’t use what you and your mother gave me, if I can’t... I have to be better. The world can’t afford to wait for me anymore.”

He rests his chin on the top of her head.

*

She shouldn't spy on them, but she does.  

"I'm sorry for what I did."

"I know you are, but Tom, listen to me, it can never happen again. Do you understand?"

"I... yes." The boy's head, his whole body bows inward. "Are you going to send me away now?"

Jason reaches up and takes him by the shoulders, squeezing maybe too tight. "I promise that's never going to happen while I'm alive, okay? It's you and me, kiddo, for as long as you want it to be. But we are going to have to leave here now." 

"Where will we go?"

"Home." 

*

She drives them to the address he gives her. The Paige in her, some snobby blue-blooded vestige, approves of the grand, austere house. But the windows are shuttered and dark. There are weeds in the fountain. The house seems dead.

Maybe it is only sleeping.

Tom grabs his bag from the back seat. Jason’s finger slides over her knuckles, then he too gets out of the car.

An old man, his shoulders stooped, his head held proudly, awaits them at the door. He says something and Jason nods an assent. The old man’s response is rueful. He steps inside the house.

Man and boy follow.

The door closes behind them as the house swallows them.

*

She does not see him again for many months.

She finds a member of the Collective holed in a Bludhaven safe house. He pisses himself and begs for mercy. She slashes his throat for him.

Some nights she takes Suditi to bed with her, even though Dominic tells her not to, that it is only hurting the older woman.

She has never been the sort of person to cry over a broken heart.

There was never a normal to go back to, but they do reach a steady state.

*

And then, one evening, Rosie is hollering to look, look at the sky, there, right there.

She sees the spotlight flash, the symbol sketched across the clouds.

A slash of gold, a living shadow moving across the skyline.

_Batman and Robin will never die._

*

There are some things a girl does not want to talk to her mom about.

Selina is a sympathetic ear and she is sanguine.

Her daughter has recently left the forest too. Soon  there will be another figure racing across rooftops.

Maybe she always knew where this was going. Maybe all mothers do.

They sit and drink tea and eat iced biscuits.

It’s hard to put into words.

She sees less of him now.

And yes, it’s fun, sometimes, when bad girl Violet Paige meets the rakish, long-thought-dead adopted son of Bruce Wayne in an exclusive club and they dance and flirt and the flash bulbs pop, though the consensus in the blogosphere is that at 42 to his 34 she is probably too old for him. 

But meetings on rooftops _hurt._

The broken edges of their selves, which for a short time had seemed to fit together, no longer mesh.

He was always self-serious, tediously so, and she always relished her selfishness.

Last week he had actually stopped her in pursuit of her mission.

 “No killing,” he had said.

“But you – ”

_“But Batman doesn’t.”_

They had fought.

Her wrist still twinges.

“It just...”she sighs and puts her head in her hands, “It just seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to, just to put him back in charge of a bat-cult.”

“It is unfair,” Selina stirs her tea. “We want them and the world needs something else and they choose the world every time. I thought _he_ at least might have been sensible enough to choose selfishly.”

She purrs and stretches and arches her back. “It's a bore, but I suppose that’s why we love them.”

**Author's Note:**

> Just your typical story of girl meets boy, girl loves boy, boy dumps girl to go be Batman. Ah, young love in Gotham. 
> 
> I can't advise using LSD like this.


End file.
